Walt Whitman’s Boss

On the morning of March 20, 1863, Walt Whitman sat at his desk in a bustling office building in Washington and penned a letter to friends. At one point, he gazed out of his fifth-floor window at the wartime capital. After a long pause he resumed writing and described the vista.

“The Potomac, very fine, nothing pretty about it — the Washington monument, not half finished — the public grounds around it filled with ten thousand beeves, on the hoof — to the left the Smithsonian with its brown turrets — to the right, far across, Arlington Heights, the forts, eight or ten of them — then the long bridge” that spanned the Potomac River.

At the end of the description, Whitman noted, “I finish my letter in the office of Major Hapgood, a paymaster, and a friend of mine.” The major was Lyman Hapgood, a native New Englander with a reputation for discretion and dependability.

The two men, however close, were a study in contrasts. Whitman was melancholic, impulsive, bohemian. The 40-year-old Hapgood, quiet and reserved, had prospered as a banker before the war. He had left his family and home in Maine in his late teens and settled in Boston, where he built a name for himself as a highly competent number cruncher and a savvy entrepreneur. He lived comfortably in the city with his wife, Elizabeth.

But beneath his conservative exterior Hapgood burned with passion for freedom. “My most earnest desire,” he once wrote, was “for the complete and triumphant success of universal liberty to all men without regard to race, color or condition.” A self-described “true and efficient laborer in the early antislavery cause,” he joined the abolitionist-led Liberty Party in the early 1840s. Later in the decade, he followed the party when it joined forces with antislavery Whigs and Democrats to form the Free-Soil Party. After the Free-Soilers merged with the fledgling Republicans in 1854, Hapgood became one of the new party’s Boston organizers. He was “active, constant, valuable,” stated a friend, “a man of sterling moral and political principles; he can be relied on everywhere and at all times.”

The efforts of Hapgood and thousands of other tireless and nameless workers in the party played a key role in Abraham Lincoln’s winning the White House. Hapgood received a reward of sorts when Massachusetts Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, both Republicans, secured an appointment for him as an Army paymaster and a commission as a major during the first summer of the war. Hapgood reported to Washington for duty. Authorities assigned him a clerk and an office in the heart of the capital city.

Whitman’s path to Washington was a more circuitous one. Six years before the war, he had written“Leaves of Grass,” a poetry collection that was roundly criticized in the mainstream media as obscene. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper savaged the second edition after its publication in 1856: “We find upon our table (and shall put into the fire) a thin octavo volume, handsomely printed and bound, with the above curious title. We shall not aid in extending the sale of this intensely vulgar, nay absolutely beastly book, by telling our readers where it may be purchased.” The reviewer added in a mocking tone: “The author should be sent to a lunatic asylum, and the mercenary publishers to the penitentiary for pandering to the prurient tastes of morbid sensualists.”

Whitman pushed forward, undaunted by the criticism. In 1860, the newly established Boston firm of Thayer & Eldridge published the third edition of “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman’s work joined other Thayer & Eldridge titles that included a memorial of the recently executed abolitionist and insurrectionist John Brown, a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, and Senator Sumner’s “The Barbarism of Slavery,” a rousing speech in support of statehood for a free Kansas. Thayer & Eldridge filed for bankruptcy a year later, and one of its owners, Charles W. Eldridge, landed a job as a clerk to Major Hapgood.

In December 1862, Whitman learned that his younger brother George, a captain in the 51st New York Infantry, had suffered a wound during the Battle of Fredericksburg. “On the way to the front in search of his brother,” explained Ellen M. Calder, who became acquainted with Whitman about this time, “Walt had reached Washington almost penniless, having had his pocket picked of all the money which had been gathered together by the family. He was, however, soon able to find Mr. C.W. Eldridge, his former publisher.” Calder added, “Mr. Eldridge could not repress the facetious comment that any pickpocket who failed to avail himself of such an opportunity as Walt offered, with loose baggy trousers, and no suspenders, would have been a disgrace to his profession.”

Whitman meanwhile had found that his brother’s wound was minor. But in the process he discovered a passion to assist injured and sick soldier boys. In dire need of cash and a base of operations to nurse soldiers, Eldridge approached Hapgood about a job for the needy poet. Hapgood complied, and hired the 53-year-old as a part-time copyist.

In his March 20, 1863, letter, Whitman described his new environment: “This is a large building, filled with paymasters’ offices, some thirty or forty or more.” He added, “Curious scenes around here — a continual stream of soldiers, officers, cripples, &c &c. some climbing wearily up the stairs. They seek their pay — and every hour, almost every minute, has its incident, its hitch, its romance, farce or tragedy. There are two paymasters in this room. A sentry at the street door, another half way up the stairs, another at the chief clerk’s door, all with muskets & bayonets — sometimes a great swarm, hundreds, around the side walk in front, waiting. (Every body is waiting for something here.)”

Whitman tagged along on numerous occasions to pay troops in the Washington area. One of the most memorable assignments involved a July 1863 trip to Mason’s Island (today Theodore Roosevelt Island) in the Potomac River, across from Georgetown, where the First United States Colored Infantry was camped.

The regiment had mustered into federal service only two weeks earlier, and this was its first payday. “The Major (paymaster) with his clerk seat themselves at a table — the rolls before them — the money box is open’d — there are packages of five, ten, twenty-five cent pieces. Here comes the first Company (B), some 82 men, all blacks. Certes, we cannot find fault with the appearance of this crowd — negroes though they be. They are manly enough, right enough, look as if they had the soldier stuff in them, look hardy, patient, many of them real handsome young fellows.”

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Whitman continued, “The men are march’d up in close proximity. The clerk calls off name after name, and each walks up, receives his money, and passes along out of the way. It is a real study, both to see them come close, and to see them pass away, stand counting their cash — (nearly all of this company get ten dollars and three cents each.)”

He added, “The clerk calls George Washington. That distinguish’d personage steps from the ranks, in the shape of a very black man, good sized and shaped, and aged about 30, with a military mustache; he takes his ‘ten three,’ and goes off evidently well pleas’d. (There are about a dozen Washingtons in the company. Let us hope they will do honor to the name.) At the table, how quickly the Major handles the bills, counts without trouble, everything going on smoothly and quickly.”

Major Hapgood and Eldridge paid the men in the other companies, and Whitman shared more anecdotes about the process and the reactions of the soldiers. He concluded his observations on an upbeat note: “These, then, are the black troops, — or the beginning of them. Well, no one can see them, even under these circumstances — their military career in its novitiate — without feeling well pleas’d with them.”

The First soon departed for Virginia, where it participated in numerous actions, including the Battle of the Crater and other engagements connected with the Siege of Petersburg. Battlefield deaths and camp disease claimed the lives of 180 of the enlisted men who lined up to collect their first pay on Mason’s Island.

Whitman eventually left Hapgood’s employ on friendly terms, and after his departure continued to use the major’s mailbox for personal correspondence. In his privately printed “Memoranda During the War,” Whitman remembered Hapgood as the paymaster “with a small mountain of greenbacks” who brought a moment of joy to soldiers on payday. “You can hear the peculiar sound of the rustling of the new and crisp greenbacks by the hour, through the nimble fingers of the Major.”

Hapgood left the Army in 1865 with the respect and admiration of his peers. “His accounts have always been remarkably correct,” noted one writer. “He is considered at the department one of the most valuable officers.” Hapgood lobbied to convert his volunteer appointment into a regular Army commission, but his efforts failed. He returned to Boston and reunited with his wife Elizabeth, who died in 1868.

The following year, as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Hapgood voted with the majority to ratify the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which became federal law in 1870. It must have been the crowing achievement of this foot soldier for freedom, as the amendment established “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Hapgood died in 1896 at age 73 of pneumonia. He outlived Whitman by four years.

Note: In his anecdote about pay for the First United States Colored Infantry, Whitman mentioned that there were “about a dozen Washingtons in the company.” According to the American Civil War Research Database, 22 men with the surname Washington served in the 10 companies in the regiment, including four George Washingtons. No single company had a dozen Washingtons.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.